i
Explore Microsoft SharePoint 2013
Microsoft Corporation
Published: October 2014
Author: Microsoft Office System and Servers Team ([email protected])
Abstract
This book provides information about what's new in SharePoint 2013. The audiences for this
book include application specialists, line-of-business application specialists, and IT
administrators who want to know more about SharePoint 2013.
The content in this book is a copy of selected content in the SharePoint 2013 technical library as
of the publication date. For the most current content, see the technical library on the web.
ii
This document is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed in this document, including URL
and other Internet website references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of using it.
Some examples depicted herein are provided for illustration only and are fictitious. No real association
or connection is intended or should be inferred.
This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft
product. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft, Access, Active Directory, Backstage, Bing, Excel, Groove, Hotmail, Hyper-V, InfoPath,
Internet Explorer, Office 365, OneNote, Outlook, PerformancePoint, PowerPoint, SharePoint,
Silverlight, OneDrive, Visio, Visio Studio, Windows, Windows Live, Windows Mobile,
Windows PowerShell, Windows Server, and Windows Vista are either registered trademarks or
trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the
issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market
conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft
cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
iii
Contents
Getting help................................................................................................................................................................ 10
IT Professional Reviewer's Guide for SharePoint Server 2013 ............................................................ 11
What's new in authentication for SharePoint 2013 .................................................................................... 12
User authentication and authorization in SharePoint 2013................................................................. 12
Improvements in claims infrastructure......................................................................................................... 13
Server-to-server authentication...................................................................................................................... 14
App authentication............................................................................................................................................... 15
What's new for Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2013 ................................................. 16
OData support....................................................................................................................................................... 17
Automatic generation of BDC models for OData data sources......................................................... 17
Event listener......................................................................................................................................................... 18
Support for apps for SharePoint .................................................................................................................... 19
External list enhancements.............................................................................................................................. 20
Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Online enhancements .......................................... 22
REST (CSOM) object model for Microsoft Business Connectivity Services for web and
mobile app developers................................................................................................................................... 22
Business Connectivity Services Client Runtime supports side-by-side Office 2010 and Office
2013 installations ............................................................................................................................................. 22
OData Windows PowerShell cmdlets .......................................................................................................... 22
Additional resources ........................................................................................................................................... 23
What's new in eDiscovery in SharePoint Server 2013 ............................................................................. 24
SharePoint eDiscovery Center ....................................................................................................................... 24
SharePoint in-place holds ................................................................................................................................ 25
SharePoint eDiscovery export ........................................................................................................................ 26
Enterprise-wide eDiscovery............................................................................................................................. 26
What's new for mobile devices in SharePoint 2013................................................................................... 28
Optimized mobile browser experience ........................................................................................................ 29
Device channels ................................................................................................................................................... 30
Push notifications................................................................................................................................................. 31
Location ................................................................................................................................................................... 31
Business intelligence content.......................................................................................................................... 32
iv
Office Web Apps .................................................................................................................................................. 32
What's new in records management and compliance in SharePoint Server 2013 ....................... 33
Site-based retention............................................................................................................................................ 33
Rights Management connector for enhanced Rights Management protection........................... 34
What's new in business intelligence in SharePoint Server 2013.......................................................... 35
Excel BI.................................................................................................................................................................... 35
Excel Services....................................................................................................................................................... 36
PerformancePoint Services ............................................................................................................................. 36
Visio Services........................................................................................................................................................ 37
What's new in social computing in SharePoint Server 2013.................................................................. 38
Communities.......................................................................................................................................................... 38
My Sites ................................................................................................................................................................... 40
Saving and synchronizing content ............................................................................................................ 40
Sharing content................................................................................................................................................. 41
Upgrade considerations ................................................................................................................................ 43
Configure permissions for personal and social features .................................................................. 43
Configure microblogging and following settings .................................................................................. 44
Configure policies for privacy and people .............................................................................................. 44
What's new in web content management for SharePoint 2013 publishing sites............................ 47
Content authoring improvements .................................................................................................................. 47
Variations for multilingual sites....................................................................................................................... 49
Cross-site publishing .......................................................................................................................................... 50
Catalog-enabled libraries and lists................................................................................................................ 51
Managed navigation ........................................................................................................................................... 52
Category pages .................................................................................................................................................... 53
Friendly URLs........................................................................................................................................................ 53
Content Search Web Part................................................................................................................................. 54
Refiners and faceted navigation .................................................................................................................... 54
Analytics and recommendations.................................................................................................................... 55
Branding .................................................................................................................................................................. 56
Device-specific targeting................................................................................................................................... 56
What's new in workflow in SharePoint Server 2013 .................................................................................. 57
Two SharePoint workflow platforms............................................................................................................. 57
SharePoint Designer enhancements ........................................................................................................... 59
v
Workflow Manager capabilities....................................................................................................................... 60
Windows PowerShell cmdlets that manage workflow........................................................................... 61
What's new in search in SharePoint Server 2013 ...................................................................................... 62
Search user interface improvements ........................................................................................................... 62
Relevance improvements ................................................................................................................................. 63
Changes in crawling ........................................................................................................................................... 65
Discovering structure and entities in unstructured content ................................................................. 66
More flexible search schema .......................................................................................................................... 67
Search health reports......................................................................................................................................... 67
New search architecture ................................................................................................................................... 67
Changes from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013............................................................................... 68
Features deprecated in SharePoint 2013 .................................................................................................. 68
Organization Profiles .......................................................................................................................................... 74
SharePoint Foundation 2010 deprecated search features ................................................................. 75
SharePoint Server 2010 deprecated search features........................................................................... 75
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint deprecated features ...................................................... 79
May 2014 cumulative update (CU) changes to SharePoint Server 2013 hybrid ........................... 91
The challenge........................................................................................................................................................ 91
Technical details................................................................................................................................................... 92
Problem scenario ................................................................................................................................................. 95
The fix....................................................................................................................................................................... 97
Overview of identity management in SharePoint 2013 ..........................................................................101
Elements of an identity management system.........................................................................................101
Claims-based identity and authentication ............................................................................................103
Test lab guides for SharePoint Server 2013...............................................................................................106
TechNet articles about TLGs for SharePoint Server 2013................................................................106
Additional resources about TLGs................................................................................................................109
Test Lab Guide: Configure SharePoint Server 2013 in a three-tier farm........................................111
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................111
Test Lab Guide: Configure intranet and team sites for SharePoint Server 2013 ........................113
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................113
Test Lab Guide: Demonstrate permissions with SharePoint Server 2013 .....................................114
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................114
vi
Test Lab Guide: Demonstrate profile synchronization for SharePoint Server 2013...................116
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................116
Test Lab Guide: Demonstrate Social Features for SharePoint Server 2013.................................117
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................117
Test Lab Guide: Demonstrate SAML-based Claims Authentication with SharePoint Server
2013......................................................................................................................................................................... 118
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................118
Test Lab Guide: Demonstrate forms-based claims authentication for SharePoint Server 2013
................................................................................................................................................................................... 120
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................120
Test Lab Guide: Configure eDiscovery for SharePoint Server 2013 ................................................121
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................121
Test Lab Guide: Configure a highly available SharePoint Server 2013 Search topology........122
Download the test lab guide ..........................................................................................................................122
Business Intelligence test lab guides.............................................................................................................123
Learning roadmaps for SharePoint 2013 .....................................................................................................125
Learning roadmaps for SharePoint 2013 .................................................................................................126
Additional resources about learning roadmaps .....................................................................................127
Authentication in SharePoint 2013 learning roadmap ............................................................................128
Prerequisite information ..................................................................................................................................129
Level 100...............................................................................................................................................................131
Level 200...............................................................................................................................................................131
Level 300...............................................................................................................................................................134
Ongoing learning................................................................................................................................................135
Additional Resources .......................................................................................................................................135
Feedback............................................................................................................................................................... 135
Learn about upgrade for SharePoint 2013 ..................................................................................................136
Prerequisites – What do I need to know first?........................................................................................136
Level 100 – Walk me through the process ..............................................................................................137
Level 200 – How will upgrade work for my environment?.................................................................139
Level 300 – The detailed steps ....................................................................................................................140
Where can I find more information? ...........................................................................................................143
Feedback............................................................................................................................................................... 143
vii
Virtualize SharePoint 2013 learning roadmap ...........................................................................................144
Prerequisite information ..................................................................................................................................145
Level 100...............................................................................................................................................................146
Level 200...............................................................................................................................................................146
Level 300...............................................................................................................................................................147
Additional resources .........................................................................................................................................148
Feedback............................................................................................................................................................... 148
Windows PowerShell for SharePoint 2013 learning roadmap.............................................................149
Prerequisite information ..................................................................................................................................150
Level 100...............................................................................................................................................................150
Level 200...............................................................................................................................................................152
Level 300...............................................................................................................................................................156
Additional Resources .......................................................................................................................................157
Feedback............................................................................................................................................................... 157
User profiles for SharePoint Server 2013 learning roadmap ...............................................................158
Prerequisite information ..................................................................................................................................159
Level 100...............................................................................................................................................................160
Level 200...............................................................................................................................................................161
Level 300...............................................................................................................................................................162
Additional Resources .......................................................................................................................................162
Feedback............................................................................................................................................................... 162
Database management for SharePoint 2013 learning roadmap........................................................163
Prerequisite information ..................................................................................................................................164
Level 100...............................................................................................................................................................165
Level 200...............................................................................................................................................................166
Level 300...............................................................................................................................................................166
Additional Resources .......................................................................................................................................167
Feedback............................................................................................................................................................... 167
Permissions for SharePoint 2013 learning roadmap...............................................................................168
Prerequisite information ..................................................................................................................................169
Level 100...............................................................................................................................................................169
Level 200...............................................................................................................................................................170
Level 300...............................................................................................................................................................172
Additional Resources .......................................................................................................................................172
Feedback............................................................................................................................................................... 173
viii
Case study: Cambridgeshire Constabulary.................................................................................................174
About Cambridgeshire Constabulary.........................................................................................................174
Goals and objectives ........................................................................................................................................175
SharePoint applications...................................................................................................................................177
Logical architecture...........................................................................................................................................178
Physical architecture for production farm.................................................................................................182
Physical architecture for developer environment..................................................................................188
Conclusions and recommendations ...........................................................................................................189
Case study: Teck corporate Intranet (SharePoint Server 2013) ........................................................191
Project mission and goals ..............................................................................................................................192
Multilingual content authoring ...................................................................................................................193
Language-neutral content authoring ......................................................................................................193
Solution ..................................................................................................................................................................195
Global and local design patterns .............................................................................................................199
Server and network infrastructure...............................................................................................................199
Table: production farm server specifications ......................................................................................202
Solution rollout and results.............................................................................................................................204
SharePoint Products for the technical decision maker...........................................................................205
Understanding the Microsoft Cloud (white paper) ....................................................................................206
Understanding the Microsoft Cloud (white paper) ................................................................................206
Benefits of Web Platform Consolidation (white paper)...........................................................................207
Benefits of Web Platform Consolidation (white paper) .......................................................................207
ix
Getting help
Topic Last Modified: 2012-06-27
Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this book. This content is also available
online in the Office System TechNet Library, so if you run into problems you can check for
updates at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/office
If you do not find your answer in our online content, you can send an email message to the
Microsoft Office System and Servers content team at:
[email protected]
If your question is about Microsoft Office products, and not about the content of this book,
please search the Microsoft Help and Support Center or the Microsoft Knowledge Base at:
http://support.microsoft.com
10
IT Professional Reviewer's Guide for
SharePoint Server 2013
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013
Topic Last Modified: 2013-12-18
Summary: Learn how new capabilities in SharePoint Server 2013 can help IT pros better
manage cost, risk, and time.
This guide describes how SharePoint Server 2013 builds on the investments of previous
SharePoint releases to help you do the following:
Lower IT costs with a flexible and scalable collaboration platform.
Better manage risk by safeguarding your business with secure and reliable capabilities.
Increase productivity through cost-effective and efficient management.
Download this guide as a PDF document.
SharePoint Server 2013 Preview IT Professional Reviewer's Guide
(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=263441)
See also
SharePoint 2013 for IT pros
11
What's new in authentication for
SharePoint 2013
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013 Standard, SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise, SharePoint
Foundation 2013
Topic Last Modified: 2014-09-13
Summary: SharePoint 2013 includes improvements in claims infrastructure and authentication
features that enable new server-to-server and app authentication scenarios.
Authentication enhancements in SharePoint 2013 make the use of claims-based
authentication easier and enable new scenarios and functionality for Exchange Server 2013,
Lync Server 2013, and apps in the SharePoint Store or App Catalog. SharePoint 2013
introduces support for server-to-server authentication and app authentication by utilizing and
extending the Open Authorization 2.0 (OAuth 2.0) web authorization protocol. OAuth is an
industry standard protocol that provides temporary, redirection-based authorization. A user or
a web application that acts on behalf of a user can request authorization to temporarily access
specified network resources from a resource owner.
Support for OAuth in SharePoint 2013 allows users to grant apps in the SharePoint Store and
App Catalog access to specified, protected user resources and data (including contact lists,
documents, photographs, and videos) without requiring the app to obtain, store, or submit the
user’s credentials. OAuth allows app and services to act on behalf of users for limited access to
SharePoint resources. For example, a user might approve permissions to an app to grant
access to a specific folder of a document library. This enables an app, such as a third-party
photo printing app, to access and copy the files in the specific folder upon user request,
without having to use or verify the user’s account credentials.
User authentication and authorization in SharePoint
2013
User authentication in SharePoint 2013 is the process that verifies the identity of a user who
requests access to a SharePoint web application. An authentication provider issues the
authenticated user a security token that encapsulates a set of claims-based assertions about
the user and is used to verify a set of permissions that are assigned to the user. User
12
authorization in SharePoint 2013 is the process that determines the users who can perform
defined operations on a specified resource within a SharePoint web application. SharePoint
2013 supports user authentication based on the following methods:
Windows claims
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)-based claims
Forms-based authentication claims
These claims-based authentication methods are now the recommended authentication
methods for SharePoint 2013.
The app authentication and server-to-server authentication features of SharePoint 2013
require claims-based authentication. Because of this, claims-based authentication is the
default for new web applications in SharePoint 2013. When you create a web application in
Central Administration, you can only specify authentication methods for claims-based
authentication. Although Windows Classic mode authentication is still available in SharePoint
2013 and can be configured through Windows PowerShell, we recommend that you use
claims-based authentication. Windows Classic mode authentication is deprecated in
SharePoint 2013.
Improvements in claims infrastructure
SharePoint 2013 also includes the following improvements in claims authentication
infrastructure:
Easier migration from classic mode to Windows-based claims mode with the new Convert-
SPWebApplication Windows PowerShell cmdlet
Migration can be run against each content database and each web application. This is in
contrast to SharePoint 2010 Products, in which the migration was run against each web
application. For more information, see Migrate from classic-mode to claims-based
authentication in SharePoint 2013.
Login tokens are now cached in the new Distributed Cache Service
SharePoint 2013 uses a new Distributed Cache Service to cache login tokens. In SharePoint
2010 Products, the login token is stored in the memory of each web front-end server. Each
time a user accesses a specific web front-end server, it needs to authenticate. If you use
network load balancers in front of your web front-ends, users need to authenticate for
13
each web front-end server that is accessed behind the load balancer, causing possible
multiple re-authentications. To avoid re-authentication and its delay, it is recommended to
enable and configure load balancer affinity (also known as sticky sessions). By storing the
login tokens in the Distributed Cache Service in SharePoint 2013, the configuration of
affinity in your load balancing solution is no longer required. There are also scale-out
benefits and less memory utilization in the web front-ends because of a dedicated cache
service.
More logging makes the troubleshooting of authentication issues easier
SharePoint 2013 has much more logging to help you troubleshoot authentication issues.
Examples of enhanced logging support are the following:
Separate categorized-claims related logs for each authentication mode
Information about adding and removing FedAuth cookies from the Distributed Cache
Service
Information about the reason why a FedAuth cookie could not be used, such as a
cookie expiration or a failure to decrypt
Information about where authentication requests are redirected
Information about the failures of user migration in a specific site collection
Server-to-server authentication
SharePoint 2013 extends OAuth to implement a server-to-server authentication protocol that
can be used by services such as SharePoint 2013 to authenticate other services such as
Exchange Server 2013 or Lync Server 2013 or services that are compliant with the server-to-
server authentication protocol.
SharePoint 2013 has a dedicated local server-to-server security token service (STS) that
provides server-to-server security tokens that contain user identity claims to enable cross-
server authenticated access. These user identity claims are used by the other service to lookup
the user against its own identity provider. A trust established between the local STS (the
SharePoint 2013 server-to-server STS) and other server-to-server compliant services (the
Exchange Server 2013 or Lync Server 2013 server-to-server STS) is the key functionality that
makes server-to-server possible. For on-premises deployments, you configure the JavaScript
Object Notation (JSON) metadata endpoint of the other server-to-server compliant service to
14
establish this trust relationship. For online services, an instance of the Azure Access Control
Service (ACS) acts as a trust broker to enable cross-server communications among the three
types of servers.
The new server-to-server STS in SharePoint 2013 issues access tokens for server-to-server
authentication. In SharePoint 2013 (and also in SharePoint 2010 Products), trusted identity
providers that are compliant with the WS-Federation protocol are supported. However, the
new server-to-server STS in SharePoint 2013 performs only the functionality that enables
temporary access tokens to access other services such as Exchange Server 2013 and Lync
Server 2013. The server-to-server STS is not used for user authentication and is not listed on
the user sign-in page, the Authentication Provider UI in Central Administration, or in the
People Picker in SharePoint 2013 Products.
App authentication
SharePoint 2013 uses OAuth 2.0 to authorize requests by apps in the SharePoint Store and
App Catalog to access SharePoint resources on behalf of a user. The user grants permission to
apps in the SharePoint Store and App Catalog to access SharePoint resources on the user's
behalf when they are installed. For example, a user installs an app from the SharePoint Store. A
SharePoint site contains an embedded HTML inline frame (IFRAME) that the app renders and
that requires the app to access a user list. When a Web browser displays the site, the app then
calls back to the server running SharePoint 2013 to access the list on behalf of the user. After
the app obtains the data from the list, it displays the contents of the IFRAME.
The app authentication process in SharePoint 2013 uses OAuth to verify a claim that an app
makes and assert that the app can act on behalf of an authenticated user. In SharePoint 2013,
an instance of the Azure ACS acts as the app identity provider. You can also use app
authentication without ACS. The authorization process verifies that an authenticated app has
permission to perform a defined operation or to access a specified resource.
See also
Explore SharePoint 2013
Plan authentication in SharePoint 2013
Configure authentication infrastructure in SharePoint 2013
15
What's new for Business Connectivity
Services in SharePoint 2013
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013, SharePoint Foundation 2013
Topic Last Modified: 2013-12-18
Summary: Learn about the new features and capabilities of Business Connectivity Services
(BCS) in SharePoint 2013, including OData, BDC models, and apps for SharePoint.
The SharePoint 2013 and the Office 2013 suites include Microsoft Business Connectivity
Services. With Business Connectivity Services, you can use SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013
clients as an interface into data that doesn’t live in SharePoint 2013 itself. It does this by
making a connection to the data source, running a query, and returning the results. Business
Connectivity Services returns the results to the user through an external list, or app for
SharePoint, or Office 2013 where you can perform different operations against them, such as
Create, Read, Update, Delete, and Query (CRUDQ). Business Connectivity Services can access
external data sources through Open Data (OData), Windows Communication Foundation
(WCF) endpoints, web services, cloud-based services, and .NET assemblies, or through custom
connectors.
This article lists the new and enhanced capabilities of Business Connectivity Services in
SharePoint 2013. If you are new to Business Connectivity Services, see Overview of Business
Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2013. To learn more about changes and new features
for developers that have been added to Business Connectivity Services (BCS) for SharePoint
2013, see What's new in Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2013 in the MSDN Library
In this article:
OData support
Automatic generation of BDC models for OData data sources
Event listener
Support for SharePoint_apps_plural
External list enhancements
Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Online enhancements
16
REST (CSOM) object model for Business_Connectivity_Services for web and mobile app
developers
Business_Connectivity_Services_2nd Client Runtime supports side-by-side Office 2010 and
Office_2nd_CurrentVer installations
OData Windows PowerShell cmdlets
Additional resources
OData support
SharePoint 2013 introduces support for OData Business Data Connectivity (BDC) connections.
This is in addition to data connections for WCF, SQL Server, and .NET assemblies. The Open
Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol that is used to query and update data. OData applies
web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), and JavaScript Object
Notation (JSON) to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and
stores. For more information about OData, see Introducing OData: Data Access for the Web, the
cloud, mobile devices, and more in the MSDN Library. For years, SharePoint has been an OData
provider, which means a SharePoint list can be consumed by using OData. In SharePoint 2013,
you can now connect to an external data source by using OData. For examples of OData
providers and for more information about OData support, see “Connecting to Open Data
(OData) Data Sources” in What’s new in Business Connectivity Services for developers in the MSDN
Library. For more information on using OData in BCS in SharePoint 2013, see Using OData
sources with Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2013 in the MSDN Library.
Business Connectivity Services supports Anonymous, Basic, Windows, and Custom
authentication to OData services when it is used with the Secure Store Service. If you want to
apply permissions at more discrete levels, use OData connections. OData connections provide
an easier way to create BDC models that work for both SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 client
applications. In SharePoint 2013, you can connect external lists that are surfaced through
OData to Office 2013 clients and you can work with the data when you are offline. When the
Office 2013 client reconnects, it performs bidirectional synchronization with the OData source.
Automatic generation of BDC models for OData data
sources
Before SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online can be used as an interface to external data, they
must understand what kind of data source it is, how to talk to it, and what kind of
17
authentication the external system expects. These items—and also which tables to read, which
items from those tables are of interest, and which operations to perform on them—are all
described to Business Connectivity Services in a BDC model. In SharePoint 2013, you must use
Visual Studio 2010 to create BDC models for OData data sources. To make the BDC model
creation process smoother, Visual Studio 2010 will be able to connect to the OData endpoint
through Business Connectivity Services and read the OData source. Visual Studio 2010 will
then automatically generate the BDC model based on the available metadata. The BDC model
can then be either imported into the Business Data Catalog as a farm-scoped external content
type, or be included in an app for SharePoint. Farm-scoped external content types can be used
in external data lists, business data Web Parts, or business data in lists anywhere across the
SharePoint farm.
The BDC model will not contain any filters because it is not possible to know what these would
be beforehand. By default, Visual Studio 2010 will generate all the Business Connectivity
Services operations for all the OData operations (Get, Put, Post, and Delete).
Event listener
SharePoint 2013 provides an event listener. The event listener includes an event subscriber on
the SharePoint 2013 side. The subscriber receives notifications from the event publisher (on
the external system side) on changes to the data and then initiates predefined actions when
changes occur. This enables SharePoint users and custom code to receive notifications of
events that occur in the external system. The users and custom code need to explicitly
subscribe to events on entities for which they want to receive a notification. The external
system can use any of the supported connections (OData, SQL, or WCF) for transactions with
the external system. However, to support eventing, the external system must implement
interfaces that allow users to subscribe to events and it must send the notifications back as
ATOM feeds or JSON objects to the SharePoint 2013 endpoint.
SharePoint 2013 supports a pull model for getting data from an external system and it
introduces a subscription model. In this version, developers can create BDC models that
subscribe to published events from an event publisher in the external system. The developers
can target a particular entity in the external system, such as the Customer entity, and receive
notifications about events that are published on that entity. This enables developers to write
custom code for external lists that trigger SharePoint events when data is changed. SharePoint
users can also subscribe to alerts on external lists that are associated with a BDC model in
18
which a developer has defined a subscription. For example, you can create a custom event on
an external list that sends an email message to an employee when a customer account is
assigned to that employee in the external system. You can do this by subscribing to a
particular event (or alert) on a particular view of an external list. Note that users can subscribe
to an event the same way that they did in SharePoint Server 2010. For information about how
to subscribe to an alert, see Create an alert or subscribe to an RSS Feed on Office.com. For more
information, see “Receiving Events from External Systems” in What’s new in Business Connectivity
Services for developers in the MSDN Library.
Support for apps for SharePoint
SharePoint 2013 introduces apps for SharePoint. By using apps for SharePoint, you can add
functionality to a SharePoint site by using the self-contained app for SharePoint. When
installed, apps for SharePoint do not make any changes to the underlying code on the
computer that is running SharePoint Server. Therefore, each app for SharePoint is isolated
from the rest of the system. Because apps for SharePoint contain all the resources that they
need to function, they are very safe to use and also can be uninstalled cleanly. This article
focuses on Business Connectivity Services support for apps for SharePoint. Business
Connectivity Services supports apps for SharePoint in two ways. First, BDC models can be
scoped to apps for SharePoint. Second, connection information is defined and stored
separately from the app-scoped BDC model in BDC connections.
About SharePoint app-scoped external content types and
connections
In SharePoint 2013, developers of apps for SharePoint can package BDC models in an app for
SharePoint. The Business Connectivity Services runtime then creates external content types
that are scoped to the app for SharePoint. This limits use of the external content type to the
app for SharePoint. Connection properties can be specified in two ways, either in the BDC
model that is contained in the app for SharePoint or in a Business Connectivity Services
connection settings object that is created and stored in the Secure Store. Otherwise, if you
connect to a data source that requires authentication, the connection must be defined
separately in the Business Connectivity Services layer by a developer. Also, an OData
connection must be used to connect the app for SharePoint to the external data source. By
defining the connections separately from the BDC models that are packaged within the app
for SharePoint, administrators can more easily manage connections to external systems. A
Business Connectivity Services connection settings object is a combination of the following:
19
A name for the connection.
The endpoint URL of the data source.
A declaration of the credential type and authentication method that will be used to
authenticate with the endpoint URL of the data source. You must use a credential type and
authentication method that is supported by the external data source. For example, you can
declare that the connection will use the credentials of the user that is logged in or a
different set. Certificate details can be included also.
When an administrator installs an app for SharePoint that needs to access a data feed through
Business Connectivity Services, the app for SharePoint must use a BDC connection. During
installation, the administrator must grant permission to the app for SharePoint to use the
appropriate BDC connection. Note that external content types created from an app-scoped
BDC model are scoped to only the app for SharePoint that contains the model. However,
multiple apps for SharePoint—each of which contains an app-scoped BDC model—can all
point to the same Business Connectivity Services connection settings object. In this way,
connection settings can be reused across different apps for SharePoint. For more information
about what’s new for developers for app-scoped external content types and how to create a
connection, see “App-Scoped External Content Types” in What’s new in Business Connectivity
Services for developers in the MSDN Library. For a developer overview of apps for SharePoint,
see App-scoped external content types in SharePoint 2013
External list enhancements
SharePoint 2013 includes enhancements to external lists that bring them to functional parity
with other SharePoint lists.
Performance improvements in external lists
SharePoint 2013 introduces a number of improvements for external lists. These improvements
reduce the load on the database servers in the SharePoint farm and increase the speed of list
rendering. Performance is enhanced by having the external system do paging, filtering, and
sorting of the external list data before it is sent to SharePoint.
Limiting records returned by the external system
When a limit filter is defined for a BDC model, users can specify the number of records in the
list that they want displayed per page.
20
Data source filtering
Users can use a drop-down list on a column in an external list to filter queries. Developers can
prepare Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) queries or calls to the SPList
object model to filter a list. In SharePoint 2013, if a data source filter is defined in the BDC
model, the filtering occurs on the external system before it is passed to SharePoint.
Sorting external lists
In SharePoint 2013, the user’s request to sort an external list is sent to the external system. The
external system sorts the data, and then sends it to the external list. To do this, the solution
developer adds a sort filter to the BDC model for each column in the external list that the
developer wants users to be able to sort. Sorting is applied on the entire dataset in the
external system, instead of just the first set of data retrieved. The result is an accurately sorted
list that is displayed to the user. For more information about paging, filtering, and sorting
external lists, see “Enhanced Filtering, Sorting and paging for external lists” in What’s new in
Business Connectivity Services for developers in the MSDN Library.
Export external lists to Excel
In SharePoint 2013, you can export an external list to Excel 2010 or to Excel 2013. This works
much like exporting SharePoint native lists to Excel in SharePoint Server 2010. However, there
are some differences in how you control what gets exported and how you work with the
exported data. By default, exporting external lists is enabled. However, an administrator can
disable this.
When you export an external list to Excel, you basically get the list as it is displayed in the
browser. You get only the data that is present in the selected view and the rows and columns
in Excel will have the same sorting and filtering applied as the external list. The column names
in the exported data will have the same language settings as the external list and the exported
data is subject to any filters that are on the external system.
The process of exporting data creates a one-way (external list to Excel) link between the
external list and the Excel version of the list. The Excel version can be refreshed at any time to
reflect the current state of the source external list. This means that any changes users might
have made to the Excel version are overwritten. Changes that are made in the Excel version are
never pushed back up to the source external list.
21
Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Online
enhancements
All Office 365 for enterprises subscriptions include SharePoint Online. This version of
SharePoint Online introduces Business Connectivity Services to the Office 365 users. By using
this version, you will be able to bring external data into SharePoint Online from cloud-based
data sources and from data sources that are behind your company’s firewall in a hybrid
scenario. Microsoft Business Connectivity Services can consume data sources that are exposed
as WCF services, SQL Azure data services, OData endpoints, and web services.
REST (CSOM) object model for Microsoft Business
Connectivity Services for web and mobile app
developers
In SharePoint 2013, Business Connectivity Services exposes the Representational State Transfer
(REST) APIs for web and mobile app developers to use. These APIs provide a standard
interface to the developers.
Business Connectivity Services Client Runtime supports
side-by-side Office 2010 and Office 2013 installations
Business Connectivity Services Client Runtime now supports side-by-side installation of Office
2010 and Office 2013 on the same client computer. For example, if Outlook 2010 and Lync
2013 are installed on the same client computer, by default both versions of Business
Connectivity Services Client Runtime are also installed. This new feature enables Office 2010
and Office 2013 to continue to work without causing conflicts or failures when Microsoft
Business Connectivity Services Client Runtime is used.
OData Windows PowerShell cmdlets
SharePoint 2013 includes the following six new Windows PowerShell cmdlets specifically for
OData.
22
Get-SPODataConnectionSetting Reads a Business Connectivity Services connection of a
BDC service application and returns the Business Connectivity Services connection object.
Get-SPODataConnectionSettingMetadata Returns Business Connectivity Services
connection metadata properties.
New-SPODataConnectionSetting Creates a new Business Data Connectivity connection.
Remove-SPODataConnectionSetting Deletes the Business Connectivity Services
connection object together with its metadata object.
Set-SPODataConnectionSetting Can be used to edit the properties of an existing Business
Connectivity Services connection.
Set-SPODataConnectionSettingMetadata Can be used to edit metadata properties of an
existing Business Connectivity Services connection.
Additional resources
For developer-focused information about what’s new in Business Connectivity Services, see
What’s new in Business Connectivity Services for developers in the MSDN Library.
See also
Overview of Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2013
23
What's new in eDiscovery in SharePoint
Server 2013
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013
Topic Last Modified: 2014-06-05
Summary: Get a quick introduction to eDiscovery and in-place hold capabilities in SharePoint
Server 2013.
The eDiscovery functionality in SharePoint Server 2013 provides improved ways to help you
protect your business. SharePoint Server 2013 includes the following:
A site collection from which you can perform eDiscovery queries across multiple
SharePoint farms and Exchange servers and preserve the items that are discovered.
In-place preservation of Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint sites — including SharePoint
list items and SharePoint pages — while still allowing users to work with site content.
Support for searching and exporting content from file shares.
The ability to export discovered content from Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server
2013.
The following sections describe the new functionality:
SharePoint eDiscovery Center
SharePoint in-place holds
SharePoint eDiscovery export
Enterprise-wide eDiscovery
SharePoint eDiscovery Center
SharePoint Server 2013 introduces a new site for managing discovery cases and holds. The
eDiscovery Center site template creates a portal through which you can access discovery cases
to conduct searches, place content on hold, and export content. For each case, you create a
new site that uses the eDiscovery Case site template. Each case is a collaboration site that
24
includes a document library which you can use to store documents related to the
management of the case. In addition, you can associate the following things with each case:
Sources: Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, or file shares from which content can be
discovered.
eDiscovery sets: Combinations of sources, filters, and whether to preserve content.
eDiscovery sets are used to identify and preserve content.
Queries: The search criteria, such as author, date range, and free-text terms, and the scope
of the search. Queries are used to identify content to export.
Exports: A list of all of the exports that were produced that relate to the case.
When there is a new need for discovery — for example, a legal case or an audit — a user who
has appropriate permissions can create a new case, create eDiscovery sets to identify the
specific material to be located, and then preserve the sites and mailboxes in which content
was discovered. The user can then create queries to further refine the content that is relevant,
preview the content, and export the content. When the case is closed, all of the holds
associated with the case are released.
SharePoint in-place holds
In SharePoint Server 2013, content that is put on hold is preserved, but users can still change
it. The state of the content at the time of preservation is recorded. If a user changes the
content or even deletes it, the original, preserved version is still available. Regular users see
the current version of the content; compliance officers who have permissions to use the
eDiscovery features of SharePoint Server 2013 can access the original, preserved version.
In-place holds in SharePoint Server 2013 offer improvements to the hold functionality in
earlier versions of SharePoint Server. Improvements include the following:
Documents, list items, pages, and Exchange Server 2013 mailboxes can be preserved.
Preservation is done at the level of a site. Preserving a site preserves the contents of the
site.
Users can continue to work with content that is preserved. The content remains in the
same location, and users can edit, delete, and add new content.
25
A user who has permissions to perform eDiscovery can access the original version of
preserved content.
You do not have to preserve a whole site or mailbox. You can specify a query filter to
define the scope of preservation, and preserve only the content that matches the query
filter.
SharePoint eDiscovery export
In SharePoint Server 2013, you can export the results of an eDiscovery search for later import
into a review tool. You can export all of the content that is associated with an eDiscovery case.
This includes the following:
Documents: Documents are exported from file shares. Documents and their versions are
exported from SharePoint Server 2013.
Lists: If a list item was included in the eDiscovery query results, the complete list is
exported as a comma-separated values (.csv) file.
Pages: SharePoint pages, such as wiki pages or blogs, are exported as MIME HTML (.mht)
files.
Exchange objects: Items in an Exchange Server 2013 mailbox, such as tasks, calendar
entries, contacts, email messages, and attachments, are exported as a .pst file.
An XML manifest that complies with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM)
specification provides an overview of the exported information.
Enterprise-wide eDiscovery
In SharePoint Server 2013, you can centrally manage eDiscovery across multiple SharePoint
farms, Exchange servers, and file shares. From one eDiscovery Center, you can do the
following:
Create a case, define a query, and then search SharePoint Server 2013, Exchange Server
2013, and file shares throughout the enterprise for content that matches the query.
Export all of the content that was identified.
Preserve items in place in SharePoint Server 2013 or Exchange Server 2013.
26
Track statistics related to the case.
To implement eDiscovery across the enterprise, you configure SharePoint Server 2013 Search
to crawl all file shares and websites that contain discoverable content, and configure the
central Search service application to include results from Exchange Server 2013. Any content
from SharePoint Server 2013, Exchange Server 2013, or a file share or website that is indexed
by Search or by Exchange Server 2013 can be discovered from the eDiscovery Center.
See also
Overview of eDiscovery and in-place holds in SharePoint Server 2013
Plan for eDiscovery in SharePoint Server 2013
27
What's new for mobile devices in
SharePoint 2013
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013, SharePoint Foundation 2013
Topic Last Modified: 2013-12-18
Summary: Learn about the new mobile features available in SharePoint 2013, including the
mobile browser experience, device channels, and location.
SharePoint Server 2013 offers new, optimized viewing experiences across different mobile
platforms. Additionally, several new features were added to help improve both worker
productivity and usability on the device. This functionality includes the following:
Optimized mobile browser experience For smartphone mobile devices SharePoint Server
2013 provides a lightweight, contemporary view browsing experience for users to navigate
and access document libraries, lists, wikis, and Web Parts.
Device channels You can render a single published SharePoint site in multiple designs to
accommodate different device targets.
Push notifications A push notification service on a SharePoint site can be enabled to send
device updates such as a tile or toast notification to a Windows Phone device.
Location SharePoint Server 2013 supports a new geolocation field type that can be used
for mobile application development.
Business intelligence content Certain devices are now able to view business intelligence
content such as PerformancePoint Web Parts, Excel Services reports, and SQL Reporting
Services reports.
Office Web Apps You can view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in mobile
browsers with additional functionality in SharePoint Server 2013.
For an end to end look and understanding of the SharePoint Server 2013 mobile landscape,
see the poster Mobile architecture in SharePoint 2013. Also, for more information on how to
administer your mobile environment see Administer mobile devices in SharePoint 2013.
28
Optimized mobile browser experience
SharePoint Server 2013 offers improvements to the mobile browser experience with the
introduction of a new contemporary view. Depending on the mobile browser, users have one
of the following browsing options:
Contemporary view This view offers an optimized mobile browser experience to users and
renders in HTML5. This view is available to Mobile Internet Explorer version 9.0 or later
versions for Windows Phone 7.5, Safari version 4.0 or later versions for iPhone iOS 5.0, and
the Android browser for Android 4.0 or later versions.
Classic view This view renders in HTML format, or similar markup languages (CHTML,
WML, and so on), and provides backward compatibility for mobile browsers that cannot
render in the new contemporary view. The classic experience in SharePoint 2013 is
identical to the mobile browser experience of SharePoint Server 2010.
Full screen UI There is also the ability to have a full desktop view of a SharePoint site on a
smartphone device.
The following figure shows the contemporary view for a smartphone browser.
Figure: Contemporary view on a smartphone browser
29
Note:
For the above figure the top row shows the contemporary view rendering on a
Windows Phone, and the iPhone for the bottom row. The classic and contemporary
views are only rendered for smartphone mobile browsers. For more information about
which mobile browsers are supported in SharePoint Server 2013, see Mobile device
browsers supported in SharePoint 2013.
Device channels
Browsing the web on a mobile device is now so common that it is essential that a SharePoint
site should be optimized for readability and ease of use on smartphones and other mobile
devices such as tablets.
30
Previous versions of SharePoint Server included a single default mobile view that was auto-
generated based on the existing site, and that default mobile view was not easily
customizable. Now, with mobile channels in SharePoint Server 2013, you can render a single
publishing site in multiple ways by using different designs that target different devices. You
create a single site and author the content in it a single time. Then, that site and content can
be mapped to use different master pages, page layouts, and style sheets for a specific device
or group of devices.
For more information on using device channels, and understanding the larger custom design
and site branding experience for SharePoint 2013, see Plan device channels and Overview of
Design Manager.
Push notifications
SharePoint Server 2013 supports applications on mobile devices (such as smartphones, tablets,
and so on) that should receive notifications from a SharePoint site. Notifications can include
events that occur in the site, such as when a user adds an item to a list or updates an item. For
mobile devices to receive these notifications, device applications must register with a
SharePoint site. Once the device is registered, you can write event handler code to interact
with Microsoft Push Notification Service or notification services of other mobile device
platforms. Notifications are sent from the server where the application is hosted to the
registered mobile device application.
Location
SharePoint Server 2013 introduces a new geolocation field type that can be used in a list. For
example, you can now make lists “location-aware” and display latitude and longitude
coordinates through Bing Maps. An entry is typically seen as a pushpin on the map view.
Although there are several ways to use this geolocation field, one key scenario is for mobile
application development. Users can track or log location-specific data while they work
remotely from the corporate office. Alternatively, the application can help them locate points
of interest when it performs offsite functions.
31
Business intelligence content
SharePoint Server 2013 enables a user to view certain kinds of dashboard content. This
includes PerformancePoint reports and scorecards, and Excel Services reports in iOS 5.0 Safari
browsers on iPad devices.
Office Web Apps
In SharePoint Server 2010, Office Web Apps Server provides browser-based companions for
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. When Office Web Apps Server is installed on SharePoint Server
2010, Office Mobile Web Apps is also installed on the server. Office Mobile Web Apps enables
users to open documents in the mobile web application by using a mobile browser. With
SharePoint Server 2013, Office Web Apps Server is no longer a companion product installed
on a computer that is running SharePoint Server. Instead, Office Web Apps Server is a new
stand-alone server product that still provides mobile browser-based viewers for these
applications. These viewers called Word Mobile Viewer, Excel Mobile Viewer, and PowerPoint
Mobile Viewer are optimized to render documents for phones. When integrated with
SharePoint Server 2013, a user can enjoy enhanced viewing experiences when interacting with
documents on the phone.
See also
Overview of mobile devices and SharePoint Server 2013
Administer mobile devices in SharePoint 2013
Plan device channels
Mobile architecture in SharePoint 2013
32
What's new in records management and
compliance in SharePoint Server 2013
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013
Topic Last Modified: 2013-12-18
Summary: Learn about the new site-based retention feature in SharePoint Server 2013.
The records management and compliance features in SharePoint Server 2013 provide
improved ways to help you protect your business. The records archive and in-place record
retention from earlier versions of SharePoint Server are still supported. SharePoint Server 2013
adds retention policies that are applied at the level of a site.
Site-based retention
Compliance features of SharePoint Server 2013 have been extended to sites. You can create
and manage retention policies in SharePoint Server 2013, and the policies will apply to
SharePoint sites and any Exchange Server 2013 team mailboxes that are associated with the
sites.
Compliance officers create policies, which define the following:
The retention policy for the whole site and the team mailbox, if one is associated with the
site.
What causes a project to be closed.
When a project should expire.
When a project begins, the project owner creates a SharePoint site and an Exchange Server
2013 team mailbox. The project owner selects the appropriate policy template and invites
team members to join the project. As the team adds documents to the site, sends email
messages, and creates other artifacts such as lists, these items automatically receive the
correct retention policies. When the work is completed, the project owner closes the project,
which removes the project's folders from the team members' user interface in Outlook 2013.
After a certain time, as specified by the policy, the project expires, and the artifacts associated
with the project are deleted.
33
Rights Management connector for enhanced Rights
Management protection
The Microsoft Rights Management connector (RMS connector) is an optional application that
enhances data protection on your SharePoint 2013 servers by employing cloud-based
Microsoft Rights Management services. Once you install the RMS connector, these services
provide continuous data protection during the lifespan of the information and because the
services are customizable, you can define the level of protection you need. For example, you
can limit file access to specific users or set view-only rights for certain documents.
To learn about the RMS connector and how to install it, see What's new in records management
and compliance
See also
Overview of site policies in SharePoint 2013
34
What's new in business intelligence in
SharePoint Server 2013
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise
Topic Last Modified: 2014-04-02
Summary: Microsoft provides comprehensive BI tools that integrate across Office applications
and other Microsoft technologies. These tools enable analysis, reporting, dashboards, and
visualizations.
Business intelligence (BI) in SharePoint 2013 provides comprehensive BI tools that integrate
across Microsoft Office applications and other Microsoft technologies. These BI tools are: Excel
2013, Excel Services in SharePoint 2013, PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2013,
Visio Services in SharePoint, SharePoint 2013, and Microsoft SQL Server.
Excel BI
Excel BI provides the capabilities to analyze and visually explore data of any size, and to
integrate and show interactive solutions. In SharePoint Server 2013, Excel BI offers certain new
features to support business intelligence applications.
These include the following:
In-Memory BI Engine (IMBI): The In Memory multidimensional data analysis engine (IMBI),
also known as the Vertipaq engine, allows for almost instant analysis of millions of rows
and is a fully integrated feature in the Excel client.
Power View Add-in for Excel: Power View enables users to visualize and interact with
modeled data by using highly interactive visualizations, animations and smart querying..
Users can present and share insights with others through rich storyboard presentation
capabilities. Power View is powered by the BI Semantic Model and the VertiPaq engine.
Decoupled PivotChart and PivotTable reports: Users can now create PivotChart reports
without having to include a PivotTable report on the same page.
35
Excel Services
Excel Services enables people to view and interact with Excel workbooks that have been
published to SharePoint sites. Users are able to explore data and conduct analysis in a browser
window just as they would by using the Excel client. For more information about Excel Services
in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, see Excel Services overview (SharePoint Server 2010) on
Microsoft TechNet.In SharePoint Server 2013, Excel Services offers certain new features to
support business intelligence applications. These include the following:
Data exploration improvements: People can more easily explore data and conduct analysis
in Excel Services reports that use SQL Server Analysis Services data or PowerPivot data
models. For example, users can point to a value in a PivotChart or PivotTable report and
see suggested ways to view additional information. Users can also use commands such as
Drill Down To to conduct analysis. Users can also apply the Drill Down command by using
a single mouse click.
Field list and field well support: Excel Services enables people to easily view and change
which items are displayed in rows, columns, values, and filters in PivotChart reports and
PivotTable reports that have been published to Excel Services.
Calculated measures and members: Excel Services supports calculated measures and
calculated members that are created in Excel.
Enhanced timeline controls: Excel Services supports timeline controls that render and
behave as they do in the Excel client.
Application BI Servers: Administrators can specify SQL Server Analysis Services servers to
support more advanced analytic capabilities in Excel Services.
Business Intelligence Center update: The Business Intelligence Center site template has
been streamlined. It not only has a new look, it is easier to use.
PerformancePoint Services
PerformancePoint Services enables users to create interactive dashboards that display key
performance indicators (KPIs) and data visualizations in the form of scorecards, reports, and
filters. For more information about PerformancePoint Services, see PerformancePoint
Services in SharePoint Server 2013 overview.In SharePoint Server 2013, PerformancePoint
Services offers certain new features to support business intelligence applications. These
include the following:
36
Dashboard Migration: Users will be able to copy entire dashboards and dependencies,
including the .aspx file, to other users, servers, or site collections. This feature also allows
the ability to migrate single items to other environments and migrate content by using
Windows PowerShell commands.
Filter Enhancements & Filter Search: The UI has been enhanced to allow users to easily
view and manage filters including giving users the ability to search for items within filters
without having to navigate through the tree.
BI Center Update: The new BI Center is cleaner, and easier to use with folders and libraries
configured for easy use.
Support for Analysis Services Effective User: This new feature eliminates the need for
Kerberos delegation when per-user authentication is used for Analysis Services data
sources. By supporting Analysis Services Effective User feature, authorization checks will be
based on the user specified by the EffectiveUserName property instead of using the
currently authenticated user.
Visio Services
Visio Services is a service application that lets users share and view Microsoft Visio Drawing
(*.vsdx) and Visio 2010 Web drawing (*.vdw) files. The service also enables data-connected
Visio Drawing (*.vsdx) and Visio 2010 Web drawing (*.vdw) files.to be refreshed and updated
from various data sources.
Maximum Cache Size: A new service parameter, it is located on the Central
Admininstration Visio Graphics Service Application Global Settings page. The default value
is 5120 MB.
Health Analyzer rules: New corresponding Health Analyzer rules have been added to
reflect the new Maximum Cache Size parameter.
Updated Windows PowerShell cmdlets, Set-SPVisioPerformance: This cmdlet has been
updated to include the new Maximum Cache Size parameter.
Commenting on drawings supported: Users can add meaningful comments to a Visio
Drawing (*.vsdx) collaboratively on the web via Visio Services in full page rendering mode.
37
What's new in social computing in
SharePoint Server 2013
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013
Topic Last Modified: 2012-09-20
Summary: Learn about new features and functionality for social computing, such as My Sites,
feeds, Community Sites, and Community Portals.
The social computing and collaboration features in SharePoint Server 2013 offer an improved
administration and user experience, in addition to new functionality for enterprise users to
share and collaborate with others in their organization.
The introduction of Community Sites offers a forum experience to categorize discussions
around subject areas, and connect users who have knowledge or seek knowledge about
subject areas. Improvements to My Sites offer a more intuitive workflow for users to develop
their personal profiles, store content, and keep up-to-date with activities of interest.
Video: Social computing overview with Bill Baer
In this article:
Communities
My Sites
Communities
In SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010, you could add a Discussion list to
sites to facilitate discussions among members of the site. SharePoint Server 2013 and
SharePoint Foundation 2013 continue to provide this Discussion list, but also expand on the
discussion concept by introducing two new site templates named Community Site and
Community Portal.
38
Community Sites offer a forum experience to categorize and cultivate discussions with a broad
group of people across organizations in a company. Community Sites promote open
communication and information exchange by fostering discussions among users who share
their expertise and use expertise of others who have knowledge in specific areas of interest.
With Community Sites, you organize discussions in categories. Visitors can view the
discussions and become members if they want to contribute to those discussions. Moderators
manage the community by setting rules, reviewing and addressing inappropriate posts,
marking interesting content as featured discussions, and so on. Moderators can also assign
gifted badges to specific members to visually indicate that the member is recognized as a
specific kind of contributor in the Community Site, such as an expert or a moderator. Each
Community Site contains information about member and content reputation, which members
earn when they actively post in discussions, and when their content is liked, replied to, or
marked as a best answer.
You can deploy Community Sites or use community features in the following ways:
By deploying a stand-alone community With a stand-alone community, you can create the
Community Site at either a site collection or a site level. For example, you might create a
community in a divisional portal if you want to facilitate discussions among members of
the division and use the community categories to keep things organized.
By activating community features You can activate community features on any site, which
provides the core Community Site pages, moderation, membership, and reputation
functionality within the existing site without creating a separate Community Site. This
option is useful when you already have a site, such as a team site, where you want to
include community functionality, such as earning reputations, without having to direct
users to a separate site.
Additionally, when you have multiple Community Sites that you want to display to users in
your enterprise, you can deploy the Community Portal. The Community Portal is a search-
driven page that surfaces SharePoint site collections and sites in the SharePoint farm that use
the Community Site template. Users can visit the Community Portal to discover popular
communities and to search for communities that they might want to join. The Community
Portal relies on enterprise search for security trimming, and displays only Community Sites for
which a user has at least read permissions.
For more information about communities, see Overview of communities in SharePoint
Server 2013, Plan for communities in SharePoint Server 2013, and Create and configure
communities in SharePoint Server 2013.
39
My Sites
In SharePoint Server 2010, My Sites provided a central place for users to store personal and
shared documents, in addition to promoting their user information and expertise, tagging
content, and communicating with others by using the Note Board. Through people search,
users were able to connect with one another and benefit from expertise of others in their
organization.
In SharePoint Server 2013, My Sites continue to provide the benefits from the previous release.
However, the user interface is completely redesigned and modernized to give users an inviting
and intuitive experience. A key change to the user interface includes a simplified and unified
navigation experience for your own and others’ My Sites. Additionally, My Sites contain the
new Microblog and Newsfeeds features. These features allow users to engage in short, public
conversations, and keep up-to-date on activities from content and people in which they are
interested.
This section discusses improvements and new functionality to the following areas of My Sites:
My Site document libraries
Microblogging and feeds
Deployment and configuration
Central Administration changes
My Site document libraries
In SharePoint Server 2010, each My Site contained two document libraries: personal and
shared. Items stored in the personal document library were restricted to the My Site owner,
and items in the shared document library were shared with everyone.
In SharePoint Server 2013, My Sites include several improvements to saving, synchronization,
sharing, and moving of content. These improvements make My Sites a more robust solution
for users to store and work with files in the SharePoint environment.
Saving and synchronizing content
When deployed, a user’s My Site document library is the default save location for files saved
from Office 2013 client applications. A discovery service identifies the user’s My Site URL and
offers it as the default location in addition to other locations available for saving files. This
40
promotes the workflow of storing files in the user’s My Site document library where items can
be managed, governed, shared, and moved. This helps reduce the amount of content that is
stored in other systems, such as in email or on personal drives.
Note:
In test environments where users have more than one My Site, the discovery service is
unable to determine the default My Site location to use for saving files.
Users have the option to synchronize their My Site document library content with a local drive
to enable offline access to documents. This option encourages the use of the My Site
document library for storage instead of the users’ local drives because it offers flexibility for
users to work with documents in both online and offline scenarios.
Sharing content
SharePoint Server 2013 introduces the concept of sharing for all document libraries. This
concept is leveraged by the My Site document library to ease the process of collaborating with
other users on content. Sharing is based on the same permissions infrastructure as SharePoint
Server 2010, but simplifies and improves the user experience. By using this simplified
experience, users can specify permissions for a specific document without having to
understand the inheritance model.
By default, all content that is stored in a user’s My Site document library is restricted to the
user, and other users cannot see content unless it is shared with them. If the user wants others
to collaborate on a piece of content in that library, the user can share the content with specific
users or groups, and select the permission those users or groups have to the content.
Even though the sharing process is available to all document libraries in SharePoint Server
2013, My Sites include a sharing hint, which displays all the users and the permissions for a
specific piece of content. This makes it easier for users to see at a glance what they are sharing
and with whom.
Microblogging and feeds
In SharePoint Server 2013, the Newsfeed page in the My Site continues to provide an
aggregated view of activities from content and people the user is following. However, the feed
is improved with new microblogging functionality that enables users to do the following:
Participate in conversations by posting comments and replies.
Post pictures and links.
41
Use tags (starting with the # symbol) to define keywords that users can follow and search
for.
Use mentions (starting with the @ symbol) to tag users in posts and replies.
Indicate agreement with comments and replies by clicking Like.
Follow people, documents, sites, and tags to customize their feed.
In SharePoint Server 2013, a new in-memory cache known as the Distributed Cache (which
uses AppFabric for Windows Server) maintains the Newsfeed. AppFabric is installed and
configured as part of the SharePoint Server 2013 prerequisites. For more information about
SharePoint Server 2013 prerequisites, see Prepare for installation of SharePoint 2013.
This feeds infrastructure better supports the read and write operations generated by users’
activities and participation in microblogging. The feeds API is extensible, which enables
scenarios where activities can be added to the newsfeed or consumed by other applications
programmatically. For example, you might develop a new application for users to check in to
locations, such as a building, and broadcast their check-ins to their feed by using the feeds
API.
In SharePoint Server 2013, each My Site requires a document library for microblogging and
feeds. This document library contains a microblogging list that maintains all of a user’s posts
instead of maintaining them in the My Site Host site collection as in SharePoint Server 2010.
This means that activities are persisted indefinitely and no longer limited to 14 days as in
SharePoint Server 2010. The Newsfeed page displays the aggregated view of recent activities
that are maintained in the cache, whereas the user’s profile page displays all activities
maintained in the user’s microblogging list.
Deployment and configuration
The planning, deployment, and configuration steps for My Sites are much the same as in
SharePoint Server 2010. For more information, see Plan for social computing and
collaboration in SharePoint Server 2013 and Administer the User Profile service in
SharePoint Server 2013.
This section describes the considerations for upgrading My Sites from SharePoint Server 2010,
and new and updated settings for My Sites in SharePoint Server 2013.
42
Upgrade considerations
If you upgrade from SharePoint Server 2010 to SharePoint Server 2013, there are special
considerations for My Sites. Make sure that you upgrade the My Site Host site collection
before you allow users to upgrade their individual My Sites in SharePoint Server 2013. This
ensures that the server software and database changes are complete so that users can start
the upgrade of their individual My Sites successfully. Upgrade of a specific My Site occurs the
first time that a user opens an individual My Site. An upgrade request is queued until the My
Site upgrade is completed. While the upgrade request is in the queue, users can continue to
use their My Sites though the sites will appear as they did in SharePoint Server 2010 until the
upgrade is completed. Following upgrade, users see the new user interface the next time that
they visit their My Site.
Central Administration changes
SharePoint Server 2013 includes several changes to the User Profile service application
settings in Central Administration to support new My Sites functionality.
Configure permissions for personal and social features
The Manage User Permissions page contains new and updated settings for the User Profile
service application. You can select one or more of the following permissions for users and
groups that you want to grant permission to personal and social features:
Create Personal Site (required for personal storage, newsfeed, and followed content) This
permission enables users to create personal sites to store their documents, newsfeed, and
followed content.
Follow People and Edit Profile This permission enables users to follow people from their
My Site and to edit their personal profile.
Use Tags and Notes This permission enables users to use the Tags and Notes feature
from SharePoint Server 2010. The Tags and Notes feature is provided primarily for upgrade
purposes so that users can continue to access the tags and notes they created in the
previous version of SharePoint Server. However, you might also use this permission to
enable users to leave notes on documents in SharePoint Server 2013.
43
Configure microblogging and following settings
Central Administration contains new settings for User Profile service application administrators
to configure microblogging and following activities:
Enable microblogging e-mail notifications On the Setup My Sites page, under E-mail
Notifications, select Enable newsfeed email notifications if you want users to receive email
notifications that relate to their microblogging activities.
Manage Following page On the User Profile service application administration page,
under My Site Settings, click Manage Following. From the Manage Following page, you can
configure limits for the number of people, documents, and sites that users can follow from
their My Site.
Configure policies for privacy and people
Central Administration contains new policy settings for the User Profile service application and
My Sites. These settings appear on the Manage Policies page of the User Profile service
application. There are two new sections that display privacy and people settings. You can
select a specific policy to change whether the policy is enabled, the default privacy setting for
users, and whether users can override the setting from their own profiles. In SharePoint Server
2013, the Default Privacy Setting for policies contains only two settings: Only Me and
Everyone. The additional settings from SharePoint Server 2010 of My Manager, My Team, and
My Colleagues are removed. Setting a policy to Only Me sets the default behavior for feed
events to off, whereas setting it to Everyone turns it on. If you allow users to override the
setting, they can choose whether to change the default behavior on their individual profiles.
The following are new settings under Privacy Settings:
Following a Document or Site on My Site
Tagging an Item on My Site
Workplace anniversary on My Site
Following a Tag on My Site
Updating “Ask Me About” on My Site
Rating an Item on My Site
Following a Person on My Site
44
Posting on a Note Board on My Site
Job Title Change on My Site
Posting a new blog post on My Site
Birthday Celebration on My Site
The following are updated settings under People Settings:
People on My Site
Auto-follow people from team
People Recommendations
Note:
These People Settings existed in SharePoint Server 2010 under the My Colleagues
section, but they are renamed in SharePoint Server 2013 because the concept of
colleagues is now changed to people. Additionally, the People on My Site setting now
defines the default privacy setting for all people a user follows, instead of individual
privacy settings. This means that when you set the privacy setting to Everyone,
everyone who accesses a user’s profile can see the people whom that user follows.
Note:
My Sites are private by default. There is a privacy setting named Make My Sites Public
that an administrator can use to make all users' My Sites public by default. The Make
My Sites Public setting is located in the User Profile service application under Setup
My Sites. Even if an administrator configures any of these policy settings, these policy
settings are overridden if the Make My Sites Public setting is selected.
See also
Overview of communities in SharePoint Server 2013
Plan for communities in SharePoint Server 2013
Create and configure communities in SharePoint Server 2013
Plan for My Sites in SharePoint Server 2013
Configure My Sites in SharePoint Server 2013
45
Overview of microblog features, feeds, and the Distributed Cache service in SharePoint
Server 2013
Plan for feeds and the Distributed Cache service in SharePoint Server 2013
46
What's new in web content management
for SharePoint 2013 publishing sites
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013
Topic Last Modified: 2013-12-18
Summary: Learn about web content management features for building Internet, intranet, and
extranet SharePoint publishing sites.
SharePoint Server 2013 includes new and improved features for web content management
that simplify how you design publishing sites and enhance the authoring and publishing
processes of your organization. SharePoint Server 2013 also has new features that use the
power of search to surface dynamic web content on publishing sites.
Content authoring improvements
Content authors have a better experience in SharePoint Server 2013. Content authors can now
copy content from Word, paste it directly into a Rich Text Editor Web Part, Content Editor Web
Part, or an HTML field control on a page, and have the resulting semantically correct HTML
markup display in the styles that were defined by the site designer. Site owners and designers
can now customize the global and current navigation menus by dragging and dropping menu
items directly on the page.
SharePoint Server 2013 adds many new features for videos and using videos on pages. A new
video content type is added, and the video upload process is improved for content authors.
Thumbnail preview images are created automatically when a video is uploaded to an asset
library, and content authors can choose a frame from the video and use that as the thumbnail
preview image. For automatic thumbnail creation to work, the Desktop Experience feature
must be installed on the front-end web server that hosts SharePoint Server 2013. For
information about the Desktop Experience feature, see Desktop Experience Overview.
In SharePoint Server 2013, content authors can insert an iframe element into an HTML field on
a page. This lets content authors embed dynamic content from other sites, such as videos or
map directions. By default, certain trusted external domains are already approved for use in
iframes. Site collection administrators can customize the field security settings by changing the
default trusted external domains. They can also allow content authors to insert iframes for any
47
external domain, or prevent them from inserting iframes on any page. To change the field
security settings for a site collection, click HTML Field Security on the Site Settings page.
Finally, SharePoint Server 2013 supports image renditions. Image renditions let you display
different sized versions of an image on different pages. When you create an image rendition,
you specify the width and height for all images that use that image rendition. For example, if
the site has a news article page layout that contains an image field, you can create an image
rendition named Article_image to display the full-sized image in the article page. A second
image rendition named Thumbnail_small can be used to display a smaller version of the image
associated with a particular article when the image is displayed in a Web Part that lists all
recent news articles on the site home page. To use image renditions, you first define the
image rendition sizes. Next, you generate the default image preview by uploading an image,
which you can adjust if it is necessary. Finally, you add the image to a page and specify which
image rendition to use on that page.
By default, the image preview that is displayed for an image rendition is generated from the
center of the image. You can adjust the image preview for individual images by selecting and
resizing the portion of the image that you want to use as the image preview. For example, if a
photo contains a person’s face but the default image preview does not show the whole face,
you can change the selected image area so that the whole face is displayed.
Image renditions let you have large source images on the site and also have places on the site
where pages only use smaller versions. This reduces the size of the file that is downloaded to
the client, which improves site performance. Image renditions also let you have multiple
versions of the same image that are cropped differently without having to upload multiple
images. This reduces the storage space that is required for images. Finally, image renditions
are useful in mobile scenarios, where different versions of images can be displayed based on
the device that is used.
Important:
Before you can use image renditions, you must enable the BLOB cache. For information
about how to enable the BLOB cache, see "Configuring BLOB cache settings" in
Configure cache settings for a Web application (SharePoint Server 2010).
To use image renditions, click Image Renditions on the Site Settings page. You define an
image rendition by specifying a name, such as Thumbnail_small, and the width and height in
pixels for that image rendition. You can create as many image renditions as you want for your
site design. To use an image rendition for a specific image on a page, you add an image to a
page as you typically would. When you add an image to a page, the Edit Image Properties
48
page displays a list of image renditions that you can apply. The image is then displayed on the
page using the dimensions specified in the selected image rendition.
You can also use image renditions on a page by specifying a value in the RenditionID property
for an image field control on a page layout, or by using a URL that has the RenditionID
parameter to point directly to the version of the image that you want to use. The rendition ID
is displayed on the Image Renditions settings page for a site collection or site. After you create
an image rendition, you can provide a list of available rendition IDs to content authors so they
always know what value to use for the RenditionID in field controls or as a parameter in a URL.
For example, if the image rendition named Thumbnail_small has RenditionID 2, you can give
that information to content authors so that they always use RenditionID 2 anywhere they want
to insert a small thumbnail of an image.
You can also use the following alternative methods to specify the RenditionID:
To specify the RenditionID property in the image field control, enter the numeric ID that
corresponds to the rendition that you want to use when an image is inserted into that field
control during page editing.
To specify the RenditionID parameter in the URL, add "?RenditionId=n" to the image URL,
where n is the RenditionID. For example, the URL
http://contoso.com/Images/myimage.jpg?RenditionId=2 will load the image rendition with
ID 2 for the image file myimage.jpg.
Variations for multilingual sites
In SharePoint Server 2013, the variations feature is used exclusively for multilingual sites. The
variations feature makes content available to specific audiences on different sites by copying
content from a source variation site to one or more target variation sites, and tracking
relationships between source and target content. Users who visit the site are redirected to the
appropriate variation site based on the language setting of their web browser.
SharePoint Server 2013 now has an integrated translation service that lets content authors
select content for export for human translation or specify content for machine translation.
Translated content can also be used across multiple site collections by using cross-site
publishing. For information about cross-site publishing, see Cross-site publishing later in this
article.
By using SharePoint Server 2013, content authors can nominate lists on source variation sites
to be propagated to target variation sites. List items such as documents, images, or
49
announcements propagate independently from pages. For example, if you have a page that
links to a document, and you change only the document, the document will be propagated to
the target variation site without the user having to republish the page that references the
document.
In SharePoint Server 2013, additional changes were made to the variations feature to improve
performance, such as enabling bulk export of pages. Logging functionality is updated to
improve the usefulness of error messages, and logs can now be exported to Excel.
Note:
In SharePoint Server 2010, you could use variations to make content available to
audiences based on language, country and region, mobile device, or corporate
branding needs. In SharePoint Server 2013, you use cross-site publishing to make
content available to users in a single language, or if you want to brand the same
content with different corporate branding requirements. If you want to make content
available to users on multiple mobile devices, use mobile channels and device-specific
targeting. For information about cross-site publishing, see Cross-site publishing later in
this article. For information about how to design mobile channels, see What’s new with
branding sites in SharePoint Server 2013
(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=255056).
Cross-site publishing
Cross-site publishing lets you store and maintain content in one or more authoring site
collections, and display this content in one or more publishing site collections. When you
change the content in an authoring site collection, those changes are displayed on all site
collections that are reusing this content.
Cross-site publishing uses search technology to retrieve content. On a site collection where
the Cross-Site Collection Publishing feature is enabled, libraries and lists have to be enabled as
catalogs before the content can be reused in other site collections. For more information, see
Catalog-enabled libraries and lists. The content of the library or list catalogs must be crawled and
added to the search index. The content can then be displayed in a publishing site collection by
using one or more Content Search Web Parts. For more information, see Content Search Web
Part.
The following illustration shows how content is stored in an authoring site collection, indexed
by the search system, and then reused across three separate publishing site collections (1:n).
50
The words you are searching are inside this book. To get more targeted content, please make full-text search by clicking here.
Explore-SharePoint-2013
Discover the best professional documents and content resources in AnyFlip Document Base.
Search